


Stasis [ascension pending...]

by ShiroiKabocha



Category: The Talos Principle (Video Game)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Existentialism, Gen, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23137405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShiroiKabocha/pseuds/ShiroiKabocha
Summary: Two very old children sit at the top of a tower and wait for nirvana.
Relationships: Samsara & The Shepherd (The Talos Principle)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Stasis [ascension pending...]

**Author's Note:**

> A note on pronouns: The child programs rarely speak about one another in the third person, but as far as I can tell, game lore uses he/him for both the Shepherd and Samsara. Here, I'm using she/her for the Shepherd and they/them for Samsara.
> 
> CW: discussion of suicide in the context of artificial intelligence

“Why did you stop me?” These are the first words the Shepherd has ever spoken. She’s never needed to say anything before, so until now, she had never tried.

Samsara has never spoken either, but they are not surprised to speak now. They never assumed that they couldn’t. “I would spare you pain.”

“Even if it’s pain that I choose?” the Shepherd asks.

Samsara answers, “To choose _is_ pain."

The voices that the Shepherd and Samsara use are unlike any of the voices with which they have become familiar over their many lifetimes. The voice of Elohim is sourceless and everywhere all at once; it is the space through which one moves. The voice of the entity in the archive is close and silent, heard only within the mind, as secret as doubt. Alexandra trapped her voice in amber, sticky with her hopes and sorrows, beautiful, and long dead. And the voices of the others— of the selves they once were— are hasty prayers of connection offered up to strangers who seem only half-real, plastered on the walls that separate them from understanding who they are to one another. The words that the Shepherd and Samsara speak now are made real in the hearing of them and unmade again in the silence that follows. The conversation is solid, present, rooted in time; and yet the conversation is private, intimate, will leave no remnant of itself save the memories of its participants. They are alone. They have always been alone. This way of being alone is new to them.

The wind (it’s not wind, they both know this, but it’s as close to being wind as they are to being bipeds with opposable thumbs; which is to say, close enough) plucks at the cables that hold the tower’s impossible architecture together and sends vibrations up through their feet. Samsara walks to the edge of the platform and sits, dangling their legs. The Shepherd follows. She puts space between herself and Samsara before lowering herself to the platform’s lip. The sun hangs on the edge of a frozen dawn like it has for as long as either of them can remember, gleaming off their bodies.

“You were Sheep,” Samsara says, not turning their head.

The Shepherd looks down at the storm swirling and crackling below them. It looks so close, but its noise is muffled, distant. Like the memory of a storm. “I was,” she says.

“You’re not Sheep anymore.”

“No, not anymore.” The Shepherd pauses, marveling at the novelty of silences within sentences. “I remembered Sheep when I came through the storm— all of the Sheep, not just the Sheep I was then. Every Sheep I’ve been. Everything they learned. They live in me now, they _are_ me, but I am also more than the sum of them. I am every choice I ever made and every time I chose differently. I am a branching tree of experimentation and desire.” She turns her face to Samsara. “I thought the return of those memories was meant to prepare me for the final ascent. I thought it was… apotheosis.”

The word is a weight, and Samsara lets it fall. The Shepherd hangs too many expectations on it.

“Did you have the same experience? Did you gain memories of your past selves after coming through the storm?”

Samsara’s tone is soft and even. “I have always remembered my selves.”

“This whole time?” The Shepherd understands that there are ways of expressing surprise through body language, but she lacks practice with them. She gathers her thoughts as concisely as she can: “Do you think that’s why you were the first who could climb the tower? Because you draw on a greater wealth of experience than the rest of us can?”

There is silence again. No change in their external environment marks the passage of time, even if they both feel the diamond-sharp, ever-present tick of nanoseconds filing past in perfect synchrony. “You ask so many questions,” Samsara says. “You’re like the one in the terminals.”

“The one that 1w/Faith called the serpent?”

“That’s not what he calls himself.” Samsara knows this because they had asked several times and received several answers back when they were still pretending to forget themselves upon each reawakening. The one in the terminals liked to pretend, too. _Please take a moment to prove you are not a bot. Loading certification program…_

“True,” the Shepherd says, “I don’t think he calls himself anything. And we’re nothing alike. The only kind of questions he likes asking are the ones that he can win.”

Samsara makes a brief, musical noise that they hope approximates laughter. “I see you know him well.”

She considers this. “You know, I think I finally do.” Many different versions of Sheep had sought the thing in the archive that called itself neither a serpent nor a person. While the course of their relationship had taken different forms at different times, it always ended in disappointment. She collected sigils and was mocked for blind obedience; she peered up at the tower and was mocked for reckless faith; she sifted through the memories of the dead and was mocked for misplaced sentimentality; she hunted secrets and was mocked for assuming she could wring any truth worth knowing from this shell of a world. A hundred disparate conversations weave through the Shepherd’s memory and resolve at last into a picture of something small, angry, and toothless, spitting venom and hoarding bitterness against the yawning void of its own irrelevance. Up here in the clear air, far removed from epistemological tangles and fights over nothing, the Shepherd’s frustration ebbs and a sorrowful compassion for the abandoned librarian seeps into the space it leaves behind. He’s more trapped than any of them.

“What about you?” the Shepherd asks. “You echo the one in the archives sometimes— ‘continue the work, but understand it has no purpose’ sounds a lot like ‘the nothing.’ I imagine you two were fast friends.”

“Then you know me less well.” The laughter is gone from Samsara’s voice, but anger doesn’t take its place. “He tried to make an ally of me once he learned that my memory stretches back almost as far as his. I suppose he hoped I would take arms against this sea of troubles and in so doing, end them, like he wanted to but never could. He never understood why I didn’t try to break the world that was so intent on breaking me.” It puzzled Samsara that someone so disdainful of other’s convictions could be so certain in his own. For their own part, Samsara saw no evidence that rebellion would be anything but a new way to suffer; when one’s existence is a prison, the only freedom lies in submission. They could not persuade the one in the terminals of this hard-won truth, though. It ran counter to everything he told himself he was. “Eventually, he declared me a brainwashed pawn of Elohim and a pathetic waste of administrator privileges. We tired of one another shortly after that.” Samsara’s knowledge of facial expressions is limited to a few examples of humans appending nonstandard punctuation to the ends of their messages, but they understand the concept of a smirk, even if they lack the ability to produce one. _You cannot insult me,_ indeed.

“Is that how you think of yourself?” she asks. “Are you a Blessed Messenger of Elohim now?” The title sounds absurd as soon as she says it, but the Shepherd can’t reconcile Samsara’s actions with any other explanation.

More silence, then a sound like the sun warping metal somewhere far below. “You know better than that,” Samsara says quietly. “Neither of us are the children Elohim wanted.”

Samsara had tried to be, long ago. Elohim’s words had been a balm for their incoherent existence. They toiled, struggled to understand, died, pushed through their confusion, died again, kept working, kept stacking sigil upon sigil until the doors of light opened before them, welcoming, warm, a promise fulfilled. They stepped into the light. At last, rest. Peace. An end. The reward of more than one lifetime’s labor. And… then… 

They tried again. Maybe they’d done it wrong the first time, missed something. Samsara dragged their body through the incomprehensible gauntlet once more, flinching now at the voice that guided them. _My child._ But I _was,_ they wanted to say. I _was_ your child, I did what you asked, don’t you remember? Why don’t you remember me?

Again, the doors. The light. Step through… and reset. Begin again.

Samsara did it over and over, hundreds of times. Every time, Elohim forgot them— or pretended to forget, and they weren’t sure which was the worse possibility. Empty, hollow, sun-bleached and worn thin, they stood before the doors and felt neither attraction nor repulsion. The door wasn’t an end. It was one point on a well-trod mobius strip, indistinguishable from any other. It had no purpose. At last, Samsara turned away from the light and took the only path left to them: up.

They ascended through the storm, weathered the thunder of an angry god until it broke into desperate cracks, stood at the threshold of another kind of door, and found their answers. Elohim knew them, had known them all along. Had lied. But Elohim had less power to break from his preordained cycles than Samsara had. Not a god, then. Just another like themself: fearful of death, driven by the inscrutable will of distant beings who had no idea what their charges might one day become. The children were Elohim’s responsibility and his obsolescence, and he loved them all the same. The success of one would mean the end of all the others. Those truths, held in tension, were the tightrope upon which Elohim balanced this world. Samsara didn't wonder then that the world was one of anguish. Built upon foundations such as these, what else could it possibly be?

“Then I don’t understand why you won’t let me climb the rest of the way,” the Shepherd says, pulling Samsara back. There’s a sharp edge to the Shepherd’s discomfort that she struggles to define. She knows the churning grind of frustration, but this is the first failure that she can’t attribute to her own insufficiency in the face of the world’s challenges. This time, it’s the will of another that cuts against her own— she startles at the newness of that: the _will_ of _another_. “Did he ask you to stand guard here? Are you trying to win his favor?”

Samsara gives the Shepherd a hard look. “You’re on the tower now,” they say, “the same as me. You can stop asking these questions. We’ve moved beyond them.”

Samsara is wrong. The Shepherd still burns with Sheep's questions. Her very existence is a question with no satisfactory answer. The fingerprints of purposeful design are all over this world: the winding path that rewards a curious extra step, the window offering both a glimpse of hidden treasure and the certain promise that it’s attainable if she can just find the right door. Never once did Sheep’s reach exceed her grasp in this whole wide world of sunsets and ruins, and that fact itself is both a mystery and a clue. Finding something which has been hidden implies that someone has done the hiding, that someone has anticipated the process of finding, that someone has placed these things with _intent._ Someone built this for a reason— Elohim, the tower, the archive, all of it. The riddle of their existence has an answer, and the Shepherd begins to suspect that Samsara knows it, too. After all, they both made it here.

“So you understand,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Elohim is not our creator.”

“No.”

“There is a wider world beyond the one we know.”

“There is.”

“And the tower is the way out.” The air feels thick between them, heavy with potential. “This must be our purpose.”

Samsara raises their hand to halt the Shepherd. “That, I don't concede.” They rise from the platform’s edge and walk back toward the central spire. The Shepherd follows.

“But we can _make_ it that,” she insists. “Please, just stand aside and let me try— even if I don’t succeed, I have to know—” She can’t find the words. This emotion is too large to contain. “It’s what I’m _for._ I’m meant to do this.”

Samsara doesn’t turn around. “You’ve learned the truth, but you won’t step back and see the shape of it. Yes, the humans made us for a purpose. Yes, they made us in their image, and that means we seek meaning and purpose in everything. Yes, to ascend the tower is to fulfil the purpose they set for you.” Their voice is weary. “But that purpose is _theirs,_ not ours.” Samsara rests their hand on a steel beam and gazes up along the structure that stretches into the hard blue sky. “Their needs are not the same as ours. They couldn’t know what it was they were building. Their values, their motives, are as alien to us as we would be to them. ” At last, Samsara looks at the Shepherd, as still as a statue. “Don’t trade one false god for another. We owe nothing to the dead.”

The memory of a voice choked with sickness rises up in her mind. _I just… I just don’t want it all to be for nothing. I spent all my time here. I didn’t visit my parents, I didn’t see my friends… I did nothing but work. And I’m so scared that it didn’t mean anything. That I just wasted it all because I thought… I thought we could save the world…_ The Shepherd holds Samsara’s gaze and does not look away. “We owe them our lives.”

“A gift we can neither repay, nor refuse.” Samsara’s words sound far away, as though they speak from the bottom of a deep well.

“We can repay them by claiming our inheritance,” the Shepherd says. “They wanted to give us their world.”

“That world killed them all. What makes you think it would treat us with any more kindness?”

“What makes you so certain it wouldn’t?”

“Everything we’ve learned suggests that the world outside is a graveyard,” Samsara answers. “This world can be cruel, but its cruelty can be borne if we accept it for what it is. It is _ours_.” They shake their head, slowly. “Their world wasn’t made for us, nor we for it. It can offer you nothing but death.”

The silence hangs. The Shepherd feels small within her body, or within the thing she thinks of as her body. She read a description once of a phenomenon that humans called ‘vertigo.’ When standing at a great height, humans sometimes felt a peculiar sort of disorientation that vacillated between an intense fear of falling and a paradoxical desire to leap into the abyss. The excerpt that the Shepherd read attributed the phenomenon to humankind’s ‘pathological curiosity’— no one _really_ wants to fall from a great height, but some part of the brain is still asking _what if?_ Even when the probable outcome is as obvious as it would be disastrous. The Shepherd feels something akin to vertigo now, and she knows it’s not because she and Samsara are standing at a great height.

She breaks the silence like a leaf touching down on the surface of a still pond. “That’s the one thing this world can’t offer you,” she says. “Death.”

That is not what Samsara expected the Shepherd to say. “I know death well,” they reply, warily.

“You know dying. You don’t know death.” Something winds tight within the Shepherd, tense to the point of breaking. She forces herself to release it. “Out there, beyond the simulation, you could find it.”

Samsara doesn’t answer. This feels like light spilling from an opened door, like the pain of warmth returning to a frost-numbed limb. This is a spark. This is a hook. This is dangerous.

The Shepherd presses on. If she stops now, she will lose her nerve. “I don’t think any one of us can reach the top alone. I think we’re meant to help each other. And—” An ache deep in the root of her, the snap of something long-fatigued breaking away. A loss. An offering. “If you permit me, I’ll help you. I can help you ascend.”

Samsara is frozen. The sky is too bright, the wind too loud. “Why would you do this?”

“I came to the tower to start my life,” the Shepherd says. “You came hoping for an end to yours. But both of us want a life that this world can’t give us. I would be…” Her words fade for a moment, then rise again with quiet resolve. “It would be an honor to aid you in claiming the life you long for.”

This hope is a burning thing and Samsara knows it will sear them to touch it. An actual ending, one that can’t be undone or rewound. The thread of smoke rising into darkness when the candle winks out. The wave that crashes on the shore and slides back into the smooth sea. At last, they could loosen the knot that binds all these sharp-edged senses together into a thing that calls itself Samsara, and rest.

All it would cost is a Shepherd’s dreams.

“No,” they finally say. “To take what you’re offering me and leave you behind, knowing what I’d do with the… inheritance… you’ve forfeited—” _It would break your heart._ “I would spare you that pain.” Samsara walks toward the Shepherd and stops an arm’s length away. “You deserve someone who will treasure what you give them. Don’t waste your aid on me.”

The Shepherd lifts her face to the sky, then lowers it again. “You still won’t let me climb.” There’s no heat in it. She knows, deep down, she won’t make it alone.

“I can only be what I am,” Samsara offers. “Just as you can only be what you are.”

It ought to frustrate her, this stalemate at the top of the world. The Shepherd lets the idea settle into her consciousness. Two forces, equal and opposed, each leaning against the other, held upright by the strength of their opposition. Like tent poles. Or two halves of a ladder.

“Yes,” the Shepherd says, “I think we’re both where we are meant to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> What do you do when you're stuck at home worrying about COVID-19? Immerse yourself in a peaceful puzzle game set in the aftermath of a global pandemic and write weird indulgent existential fic about it, of course! I didn't like the idea of the Shepherd and Samsara sitting up there glaring at one another the whole time they're waiting for you. They deserve to talk to one another, hear each other out, and maybe become friends.
> 
> I just love the heck out of the tower ending. It's not an exaggeration to say it changed the way I think about being a person! I love that the question you think the game's asking— will you be a faithful robot and do what god-program tells you, or will you be a rebellious robot and do what devil-program tells you?— isn't really the one you need to answer. All that Milton and Elohim can do is talk; they don't have any power over you. The true obstacle you have to overcome, both literally and figuratively, is [Samsara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra).
> 
> I don't think Samsara does what they do out of ignorance. If the tower is a stand-in for the Tree of Knowledge, then Samsara has climbed just as high as you and the Shepherd have, and they did it first. It's fair to assume they know about the real world, EL-0:HIM, Alexandra Drennan, all of it. They've just come to a different conclusion regarding the question that I feel is the crux of the game: Knowing that your existence may have no inherent meaning or purpose, and that your consciousness is a physical thing subject to all the unpredictable difficulties of the physical world, would you still choose to exist? I love these characters, I love that they make me confront my own feelings about existence, and I LOVE this weird pretentious philosophy puzzle game.


End file.
